Tuesday, 22 March 2016

Talkin' 'bout my generation

For several months, I regularly visited the St John & St
Elizabeth Hospital in St Johns Wood – next door to the Wellington
Hospital. I was being treated for an
injury to my shoulder, caused by a left-hook incident with a black cab on
Blackfriars Bridge. Months of physiotherapy, with an unsuccessful cortisone
injection into my shoulder joint, culminating in the unavoidable keyhole
surgery which finally fixed it.

The shoulder injury didn’t however prevent me from riding my
bike to my appointments, nor did the experience which had led me there
discourage me – despite this being my third experience of left hooks, the first
two also being with black cabs, which ought to have told any sane person that
riding a bicycle on London roads is just plain dangerous.

To return to my office in the City, I would ride down Park
Road and turn left into Hanover Gate, passing the Regent’s Park Mosque, to
access the Outer Circle. The first time I was struck by how many black cabs
turned with me. I was rather more struck
however by the speeds at which traffic (not specifically black cabs) passed me
on the Outer Circle – I wasn’t carrying a radar gun but my impression was that
they were well above the 30mph speed limit.

Back to the title of this post: it is also the title of a hit single by ‘60s supergroup The Who – one of their signature tracks, on their 1965 LP “Meaty
Beaty Big & Bouncy”. In it Roger
Daltrey starts with

“People try to p-put us down.
[Chorus] Talkin’ ‘bout my generationJust
because we get around”

Well, in 1965 Daltrey was 21, and he was clearly talking
about the age’s new adults.

A couple lines later, Daltrey sings:
“I hope I die before I get old”

Well, I am not sure he does now, and indeed he might not
regard himself as old, despite now being 72 – “old” is more a state of mind
than a number of years.

But Daltrey’s generation is also the Baby Boom generation.
They are distinguished by many things – the peak of the final salary pensions
boom for example, and cheap housing made even cheaper once the early ‘70s high
inflation had taken effect.

They were also coming of age, and so becoming eligible for a
driving licence, just at the time that the era of mass car ownership was
kicking off.

And now? Well, I sense that Roger Daltrey’s generation was
probably the most heavily represented, indeed over-represented, demographic at
the meeting last week with Andrew Gilligan and TfL about CS11 and the proposals
for the Outer Circle in Regent’s Park.

So we see a backlash from the first – and in some ways last -
generation of universal car ownership.
If you look at those graphics showing car ownership by age, the peak
decade is 65-75. Now, if you find
similar graphics for previous years, what you see is a kind of moving wave –
ten years earlier, the peak age was ten years younger, and so on back to the
‘60s. Certainly the tail-off is quite
gentle at first, steepening as you get to the under 35s, but it is nevertheless
distinct.

Daltrey’s generation grew up to see the private car as a
relief from the postwar austerity of their childhoods and a symbol of personal
freedom – the freedom of movement for example enabling them to travel further
afield for work and explore opportunities not available to their parents. The trouble
is they simply cannot imagine that there may be other ways of achieving the
same mobility and the same freedoms, at least within the short distances and
congested streets of an inner city. A challenge to their unfettered freedom to
drive is an assault on liberty itself, an existential threat. They are
frightened.

But it will pass. In another ten years they will be relying
on mobility scooters, and they will be grateful then that the superhighways
were built, despite their best endeavours to stop them.